AI Rain turned Camden High Street into black glass. Blue light flickered off puddles as a bus pulled out with a hiss, throwing a sheet of water that slapped her trousers cold against her legs. The hooded figure cut between a shuttered vape shop and a kebab stall with its spit dead and greying. Harlow tracked his shoulders, not the bounce of his feet. Shoulders told you when a runner would pivot.
She pressed the transmit on her radio and kept her breath even. “Control, Quinn. Foot pursuit, one male, black hoodie, grey joggers, heading north from the Lock. Possible link to Archway homicides. I need units to seal Jamestown Road and Hawley Crescent.”
Static snapped. “Quinn, confirm you’re alone.”
“I’m on him.”
The runner glanced back. A smear of a face under wet fabric. He flashed a grin that didn’t reach his eyes and veered left under the railway bridge. Harlow quickened , scan right, left, up. Cars thumped over the bridge. Rain drummed the corrugated underside. A tag—white antlers—spooled across wet brick at head height.
“Police. Stop.” Her throat thrummed with it .
He bolted into a service alley pooled with oily water. A skip leaned like a dead horse against the wall. She watched his leg lift, foot find coiled cable, then the top of the skip, then over. She ran at it, palms on cold metal, vaulted. Her boot heel skidded. Iron bruised her shin. She dropped into the puddle, water up her calves, knees biting with cold. Her watch strap dragged wet against her skin. She drove on.
“Control, suspect now eastbound behind Stables. He’s heading for the canal.”
“Backup five out.”
Laughter leaked from a doorway where two kids smoked in the glow of a phone, noses pink, jackets dark with weather. One of them pulled the hood closer and took a step back when he saw her badge flash at her belt.
Harlow hit the towpath. The canal breathed diesel and damp earth, rank and old. Barges bobbed, ropes creaking. The runner took the narrow footbridge to the other side, light on his feet over slick iron. She took it fast, hand grazing the rail, shoulders square to his back.
“Don’t make me tackle you.”
“Then don’t miss.”
He drove past the closed gates of the market, past canvas stalls sagging with water. The fairy lights were dead. A piece of bunting pasted itself to the stone like a drowned bird’s wing.
He cut toward the railway again, hugged the shadow of the viaduct, and slipped through a chain gate someone had left unpadlocked. She shouldered it and it clanged off the wall. The noise boomed like a gunshot in the tunnel.
Her lungs burned clean. Fit, not young, but her strides placed where they needed to land. Military rhythm. Hips level. Knees up. She ate the ground between them.
“Control, I’ve got him going toward Bayham Street. He knows the back ways.”
“Heads-up, units converging from the south. Keep line of sight.”
“Line of sight maintained.”
He glanced back again and saw the truth of that. His pace stuttered. He snapped a look right. The pavement ran along a high brick wall, old brick glazed from a century of damp. A wrought-iron gate set in it showed a faded sign: No Entry—Authorized Staff Only. The padlock hung off its staple, chewed open. He slipped through.
Harlow’s jaw flexed. Rain beaded on her lashes, the cold gnaw painting a line up her spine under the soaked shirt. She angled her shoulder and shoved the gate. It complained, then stretched inward.
A smell hit her from the stairwell beyond: cloves, engine oil, something sweet and ferrous. The tiles on the steps were those old cream-and-green squares you only saw in stations built when people wore hats to work. A cracked enamel plaque climbed down the wall with the words CAMDEN—something—bleeding into lost letters under smoke and grime.
“You don’t want this,” drifted back from the dim. A voice off stone. Male, young, too cocky to be wise.
“You don’t get a vote.”
His trainers slapped tile. The sound fell away. Harlow stopped at the top, boot toes at the lip, and fixed the angles. A single bare bulb swung a slow arc and threw her shadow long down the steps. It caught on a second gate at the half-landing. Something heavy with bolts.
Movement below, a soft chorus of voices, distant machines, a bell that didn't belong to this century. She clicked her radio. “Control, he’s entered a restricted access point under Bayham. Looks like a disused Tube entrance.”
“Quinn, hold. ARV en route. Don’t go underground alone.”
“I copy.”
She didn’t move. She looked at her watch . The second hand dragged quiet across a face fogged with rain. DS Morris had faded on steps like these, his voice cooked by static until it was no voice at all. Different case, different door, same stink of earth that had been closed too long.
A shape unpeeled itself from the wall at the second gate. The figure wore a flat cap pulled low, coat black and wet, shoulders square. He carried his chin like a man betting others would step aside. He gripped a heavy keyring in one hand and the second gate in the other. On a nail head by his elbow a string of small white things hung—the size of thumbnails, not shell, not plastic. Bone.
His gaze climbed the stairs and found Harlow. He didn’t lift his chin or ask who she was. He pursed, spat to his right like marking turf, and let the keys dangle. “Got bone?”
“Move.”
“Got bone.”
She ran her fingers over her pockets. Torch. Gloves. Not a scrap of whittled knuckle there. Of course there wasn’t. She stilled her breath and took the first step down. “Police. You’re going to open this gate.”
He wasn’t laughing , not even inside. “No bones, no going. Market rule.”
The runner slid through behind him, ghosting close enough to wet his sleeve against the man’s coat. Hands exchanged. A pale chip clicked dry into the gatekeeper’s palm. The man slotted it into a rusted box beside the bars. The lock thunked. The gate’s hinges rolled as smooth as a new car door. The runner passed inside without looking at Harlow again.
“Hold it.”
He glanced back once, dead eyes over his hood drawstrings. He sunk into smoke and tile and the weird river of bodies that ran beyond—shapes in oilskins, a woman in a red dress barefoot on cold stone, a man with a case that breathed like a thing alive.
“Close it,” the gatekeeper murmured around his mouth.
“Don’t even think—”
A hand landed on the rail above her, fingers long, scar tissue ridged along the forearm. Olive skin wet as river stone. “Quinn. You pick the evenings."
Tomás’s voice carried a tired smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He jiggled his Saint Christopher medallion with his thumb and let it fall against his chest. It flashed a coppery halo in the stark light and went still.
“Out of my way, Herrera.”
“They won’t let you in.”
“They’ll let me if they want to keep their teeth.”
A low chuckle down the wall. The gatekeeper shifted his weight just enough to show he wasn’t worried.
Tomás leaned on the rail, shoulder shrinking against rain. Short curly hair sprung into tight commas on his scalp. His breath plumed sweet with mint. “That’s not how this door works.”
“You moved it.”
“Door moves itself.”
Her eyes cut to him. He lifted the scarred arm in a slow shrug. Rain gathered at his elbow and fell. “Full moon,” he said. “You know that one.”
“You run medicine for them.”
“I patch holes. That’s different.”
Her throat worked once. “The boy in the hoodie—who is he?”
“Ren who sells batteries that never die. Ren who also moves powders that never should have been cooked. Ren who will vanish behind that gate and walk out in a different part of the city by sunrise if you chase him the regular way.”
“You let him walk?”
“You think I brought him his lunch box."
She folded the badge at her belt with her palm and felt the shape of it. Sharp corners. Weight of oath pressed cool through wet clothes. Her gun dragged heavy at her waist, damp creeping into leather. She pictured Morris’s blue eyes scalding with laughter as he skipped two steps at a time, stupid enough to go first every time because he thought he was blessed.
“Tommy,” she said, and it came rough despite her best, “give me a token.”
His jaw ticked. His warm brown eyes cut to the gate, then back to her. The upstairs world hummed with weak late buses and hungry foxes and kebab meat hardening in grease pans. Down below, that bell chimed again, low and almost kind. Tomás’s gaze darkened.
“You go in with that badge and you will set something off.”
“Then I won’t go in with it.”
“Can’t tuck what you are.”
“Watch me.”
He held her stare until a nervous cough he’d never let anyone hear twitched behind his top lip. He reached into his coat. The inner pocket disgorged a leather fold swollen with papers and elastic, a roll of notes, a foil of painkillers, a strip of sutures. He closed fingers on something small and pale.
“You don’t owe me this,” she said.
He snorted. “I owe everyone everything. It’s my worst habit.”
His hand opened. A token lay white against his wet palm. Oval. Smooth as a worry stone. Etched with a line that could have been a river or a seam of someone’s life.
She didn’t reach for it. “Terms.”
“You go in alone. You keep quiet. You don’t draw. You don’t arrest. Not inside. Market has its own law.”
“He stabbed a kid in Archway.”
“Outside. Take him there.”
“You think I’m going to let him keep breathing commerce under my nose.”
“You go in and they will close around you. You flash that thing on your belt and they’ll take your tongue and sell it to a hedge witch who makes it sing for her grandchildren.”
“Colorful.”
“Accurate.”
She listened. Always listen twice. The river of sound below was dense. Layers of it. Traders hawking, nothing like the market topside. Voices worked in old accents London forgot. Glass chimed. A goat bleated. The stink of iron thickened.
Her radio hissed in her ear. “Quinn, units two minutes out.”
“Two minutes is a month in there,” Tomás said, quiet, so it only brushed her.
“Control,” Harlow pressed transmit, pulse running hard through her forearm against the button. “I’ve located an underground market access. I’m maintaining position.”
“Hold position.”
She let the transmit drop.
Tomás nudged the bone. “This buys you entry, not safety. They will take you apart if you don’t respect it.”
“I’ve never been good at respect.”
“You were good once at staying alive.”
“Don’t make this about Morris.”
He didn’t. He tucked his chin and studied the tile under their feet like it had lied to him. Rain bled down the stairwell. The gatekeeper watched with the patience of carved wood.
From beyond the gate someone called a name that wasn’t the runner’s, a pet name, a threat. Another swell of movement went past, heat and human smell. The boy had gone in. Every second fattened the gap until it would be a canyon.
Tomás folded the token into her fingers. His skin was warmer than hers. The Saint Christopher medallion tapped her knuckle, a soft metal kiss. He didn’t release her hand until he knew she had it.
“You have no idea what you’re choosing,” he said.
“I never do. It keeps things fair.”
He pulled his hand back and slid his own token string behind his collar, hair curling tighter against his head. He showed her his left forearm, the scar ridge bright where water tracked it. “See this?” He didn’t wait for her nod. “I got that on the wrong side of a promise I made in there. This isn’t your world.”
She rolled the bone between finger and thumb. It weighed too little to buy her anything that mattered. She looked down. The gatekeeper held out his palm. Waited.
She took the badge off her belt, not to ditch it, but to bury it . She slid it under the waistband at the small of her back. She covered it with her shirt. She adjusted her holster deeper under her jacket so rain wouldn’t show metal. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
Tomás watched, eyes giving nothing, not approval, not reproach.
“You won’t get me out if they close around me.”
“I won’t even know you’re in trouble.”
“Good.”
She moved. Two steps down put her in the gatekeeper’s breath, unwashed wool, cloves, bite of copper. She held his gaze and set the token in his palm.
His fingers folded. He palmed it like you palmed an old coin, quick and hidden. He slid it into the slit beside the lock. Something inside caught and turned. The gate whispered on its oiled hinges and gaped seven inches.
“No guns,” he said, voice flat as the tile .
“That a rule or a suggestion.”
“House comfort.”
She didn’t hand him the weapon. She angled her body so he couldn’t pat her down without starting a new kind of trouble. She kept her shoulders square, her chin low, her eyes away from his eyes now the price was paid .
“Met Control,” the radio rasped, thin now.
She reached up, thumbed it off. The hiss died. For a flare of a second the stairwell held only rain and breath and the far market’s thrum.
Tomás put a palm on the rail above her again. He leaned in until she could see the tiny chips on his front teeth and the burn of red around the rim of his eyes from no sleep. “Don’t pick fights you can’t finish in there.”
“I never pick fights.”
“You’re you. Every fight picks you.”
She pushed through the gap. Brick sweat slicked the inside of the gate. The tile under her soles changed pitch, went from cold municipal to old church. Heat lapped her shins from brazier fires somewhere down in the skeleton of the station. A woman walked past two steps inside with a cage of moths that glowed like stranded stars. A man in a suit held a case with air holes that exhaled. Someone hawked something that sounded like luck by the pinch .
Harlow felt the old weight again—the thin line between the city she knew and the one that lived in its pockets—and chose. She pulled the gate the rest of the way with her hip and stepped into the Market.